Sound Check

The reopening of Alice Tully Hall.

The pianist Wu Han happily told an audience at the renovated hall—Lincoln Center’s chamber-music venue—that it was “the quietest place in New York City.”

Illustration by Arnold Roth

What makes a great concert hall isn’t simply a matter of acoustics. Unpredictable variables come into play: the façade, the décor, the buzz of the crowd, the smile of a familiar usher, your memories of past concerts, your entire inner world as it stands at a few minutes after eight. The golden glow of Carnegie Hall puts listeners in a welcoming mood before the music begins. The silvery brilliance of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Hall engenders a state of bright alertness. The tangy air of the East Anglian coast seeps into concerts at Snape Maltings, an old malthouse that Benjamin Britten reinvented as a near-perfect space for music. Over time, such places can acquire the aura of a warmly remembered childhood home.

Then there are halls that project, on account of acoustics or aesthetics, a negative ambience. For years, my bête noire was Alice Tully Hall, the chamber-music venue in the Lincoln Center complex. The acoustics weren’t terrible: you could hear clearly from most parts of the room. But the sound was dull and dry, flopping down in front of your ears instead of floating around them. A distant hum of ducts, vents, and subway noise intruded. The interior design, an arrangement of brownish walls and reddish seats, had the soothing facelessness of an upscale funeral home. More than once at Tully, I had the experience of being vaguely disappointed by an artist who had thrilled me elsewhere. Passionless performances, in turn, seemed par for the course, somehow less offensive than they might have been at a vibrantly intimate space such as the music room at the Frick Collection, or Wigmore Hall, in London.

Tully has now undergone a hundred-and-fifty-nine-million-dollar renovation—the opening move in a scheme to transform Lincoln Center’s public image. When the complex opened, in various stages throughout the nineteen-sixties, it embodied a big-box approach to the presentation of the performing arts: orchestras, chamber groups, opera, dance, and repertory theatre were bundled into a multipurpose package of Art That’s Good for You. The idea now is to break up that blandly grand configuration and restore individuality to the resident organizations. How far the plan proceeds will depend on the outcome of the current economic crisis. The money for Tully arrived just in time; on opening night, several people in the audience joked that the Morgan Stanley Lobby and the Citi Balcony might have to be renamed for President Obama.

The visual dimension of the new Tully—the towering glass façade, the seductively curved bar and café, the rich-hued moabi wood on the auditorium walls, the high-tech L.E.D. system that makes the wood glow from within—has drawn wide acclaim. My first impression was that I had been transported to some cool new space in Copenhagen. New Yorkers are intrigued, which is not easy to accomplish. Every performance in the first week was packed, partly as a result of a generous decision by Lincoln Center to sell all tickets for twenty-five dollars or less. Curiosity-seekers filled the lobby on weekend nights, creating an atmosphere that could be described as (I type this unfamiliar word with care) hopping.

The sound is greatly improved, although I’m not ready to join the musicians who, for a news story in the Times, described it as “heaven.” The figurative film of grime that used to cover everything is gone; the music is bright and alive, with the softest dynamics perfectly audible. The pianist Wu Han—the co-director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which is Tully’s principal tenant—happily told the audience on the second night that the hall was “the quietest place in New York City,” and she may be right. Lincoln Center persuaded the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to install rubber pads beneath nearby subway tracks in order to mute the rumble of trains. Throughout the opening week of concerts, artists savored the emergence of sound from silence: Leon Fleisher gave a daringly meditative rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue; David Robertson led the Juilliard Orchestra through the vast, still regions of Olivier Messiaen’s “From the Canyons to the Stars” (premièred at Tully in 1974); and, most strikingly, Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Gent drew a Sunday-evening audience about as far into the sacred realm of Bach’s Mass in B Minor as humans are currently allowed to go. When the countertenor Damien Guillon sang an eerily pure Agnus Dei against a fragile latticework of violins and continuo, a thousand people holding their breath, I felt stirrings of love for the new Tully.

For all the added clarity and focus, though, the acoustics remain dry, meaning that sounds decay quickly as they come off the stage and fail to generate an afterglow of resonance. On opening night, when I was seated in the center orchestra, some way back from the stage, I found that string timbres, in particular, were a little pale and thin. The Brentano Quartet dug into Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” with customary ferocity, but the music seemed frustratingly constricted. On other nights, when I was seated closer, or when the stage was extended farther out, this problem diminished. Large ensembles have no trouble creating brilliant, buoyant climaxes; yet conductors will have to make allowances for the fact that musicians seated near the rear and side walls project much more easily than those in the middle. A performance of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella,” with Chamber Music Society veterans and Juilliard students under Robertson’s exacting direction, threatened at one point to become a concerto for trombone and orchestra, although the precise and vital playing of the young trombonist Nicholas Hagen made it a winning proposition.

When Alice Tully Hall first opened, in September, 1969, it served up such meat-and-potatoes fare as Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” and Schubert’s Quintet in C. Lincoln Center is now less inclined to play it safe, as a two-week festival titled “Opening Nights” demonstrated. The first sound heard before a paying audience in the new Tully was symbolic: Jordi Savall, the great Catalan viola da gamba player and early-music explorer, picked up a rebab, an ancient Middle Eastern fiddle, and launched into an old Sephardic romance of Moorish Spain. Other events included “War and Pieces,” a conceptual evening on the theme of war, by the British violinist Daniel Hope; “Vita Nuova,” an operatic setting of Dante’s early work, by the contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov, courtesy of Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic; and a post-minimalist marathon with Steve Reich and Musicians, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and Alarm Will Sound.

Not all these ventures worked. Hope’s war concert started strongly, with a raucous, topsy-turvy arrangement, by the German composer Jan Müller-Wieland, of Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture, but it lost steam during Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat,” which featured an alternately hammy and indecipherable recitation by the actor Klaus Maria Brandauer. Martynov’s “Vita Nuova” turned out to be an excruciatingly protracted excursion through other people’s musical ideas, although the composer’s knowledge of Russian Orthodox chant produced moments of austere beauty. Still, I’d rather endure an unsuccessful new piece than a dreary run-through of standard repertory. The Chamber Music Society has made great strides under the leadership of Wu Han and David Finckel, foregrounding new music and offbeat repertory, but a desultory reading of Beethoven’s Septet on the second night of concerts brought me back to the Tully doldrums of earlier years. The livelier acoustics demand livelier playing.

Will the new hall acquire more warmth as it ages, or will dryness take over? It’s worth remembering that everyone professed to love the original Tully in 1969. Critics called it “musical heaven,” a “beautiful, acoustical dream of a small hall,” a place with a “fine aura of luxury.” This magazine pronounced the acoustics “perfect.” Perhaps in forty years the latest incarnation of Tully will no longer give much pleasure, but, for the moment, this handsomely tailored, sharp-toned venue is exactly what Lincoln Center needs. You no longer walk into the hall with the clammy sensation of having arrived in classical-music limbo. ♦

Alex Ross, the magazine’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.”